It must be my karma, or in this case CARma. This evening Ed and Tiffany invited us out to dinner to celebrate my birthday. Although we met at their place, we drove separate cars to the restaurant (a brand new oriental buffet). On the way, my car started really acting funny. The air conditioning went off. Then a couple minutes later the dash lights dimmed. Then the ABS brake warning came on. Then the tachometer dropped to zero rpm. We pulled into the buffet parking lot and shut off the engine. The car wouldn't start again. It just went brrrrrrrrrr.
After dinner the car started back up again and we drove toward home. About two minutes later it started the whole routine and as we reached the halfway point, the engine dropped to minimum power so we were barely able to get across a busy intersection. We had just enough power to pull into a grocery store parking lot and park the car. We couldn't even roll up the windows until we shut off the engine.
Thanks to cell phones, we called Ed and Tiffany who picked us up and brought us home. Tomorrow we've got to figure out how to get the car towed to the dealer to see what's wrong and how much it will cost to fix. Then we'll see about buying that new Hybrid as soon as possible.
I don't know how much longer my 'piece of crap' (how my boss refers to my car) will last, but it has 258,000 miles and going strong. It also gets 25 mpg in the city and 35 on the hwy (and somewhere between in the LA traffic).
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